New efforts!

[Arcana]

Actually that is not true anymore, science has discovered particles that travel faster then the speed of light. And if I remember my science classes particles are solid just cannot be seen by the naked eye.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/particles-found-to-travel/

Yeah, not really: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/faster-than-light-neutrin/

About six months after OPERA's initial results were disclosed, the experimental team discovered two errors in their experiment: a loose cable that altered their test results slightly and a clock oscillator that was improperly calibrated.  Ironically the clock oscillator was running too fast which made the flight time of the neutrinos appear to be larger and thus the neutrinos appeared to be moving slower than they actually were, but that nearly cancelled out the delay caused by the loose cable.  The net result was that the neutrino flight times were measured as just a tiny bit lower than they actually were, which made the neutrinos appear to be moving slightly faster.  Either error alone would have been so large the experimenters would have known something was wrong, but the two errors combined to create a plausible result: neutrinos moving a hair faster than light.  When those errors were corrected, the superluminal velocity of neutrinos disappeared, and neutrinos were now observed to be moving at essentially the speed of light within their margin of error.

It should be noted that not only did the OPERA team find their technical error, but a nearby experiment called LVD combined their data with OPERA's data observing cosmic ray muons and discovered that the OPERA timing was different from the LVD timing by an amount consistent with the experimental error the OPERA team discovered.  So it wasn't just a case of the OPERA team changing their machine to get the results others wanted: it wasn't just making neutrino errors it was also making other timing errors that could be confirmed by comparing those results to other data being collected by completely independent experiments.


Edit: curses, too slow.

[Felderburg]

Of note, the fact that people were willing to publish results they thought might be erroneous because they show FTL particle travel sort of proves Joshex wrong - if there was *true* unquestioning hero worship, the results would have been covered up until the error was found, and published as if nothing happened.

e here is the electrostatic permeability of the vacuum and m is the magnetic permeability of the vacuum

Could you explain "permeability of the vacuum?"

Dammit Jim I'm a doctor not a census taker.

That may be true, but I wouldn't trust you to perform a medical procedure on me.

[Taceus Jiwede]

Ya those particles moving faster then light were somehow not really moving faster then light.  Not really my area of expertise.

But it goes to show that once again Joshex could not be more incorrect even if he tried.  So many people would love it if we found a way to travel faster then light, and it certainly hasn't gone un-attempted. 

[Twisted Toon]

I always thought "gone to the Americans" meant the game would be "gone, to the Americans," not "gone *to* the Americans." The result of jerk hackers making the game so messed up or unprofitable that the publisher would take it off the shelves, and to the american point of view, it would be gone.

It is hard to tell exactly what was meant, what with the incomplete punctuation in the original Unique Dragon post.

Technically speaking, relativity doesn't directly state that no object can move faster than the speed of light, even though some people (even physicists) make that claim.  But relativity does assert that time is relative: time passes at different rates for different observers and there is no such thing as a universal time that all events can be measured by.

Which would probably explain why light acts funny when it plays with a Blackhole.

As a consequence of the specific mathematics involved, if you could send messages faster than light (via particles, waves, whatever) that would violate the law of casuality: specifically it would no longer be true that for all observers a casuality chain (where event A causes event B) would be preserved.  It would be possible for some observers to see A cause B and others to see B cause A.  It is possible to construct scenarios where you send a message and you get the reply before you sent it.  This causes all sorts of problems for physics, and a universe in which causality isn't preserved is difficult to reconcile.

I'm of the opinion that, if there were faster than light communication (or travel for that matter), that you wouldn't be able to get a response before you send a message, no matter how much faster than light the communication is. There would still be some forward progress of time during the transmission. Traveling at 100x the speed of light would not actually allow you to travel backwards in time. it would still take some time to get from point A to point B. You would just get there 100 times faster. All traveling faster than light would allow you to do (time travel wise) is look at different times in the past of distant parts of the universe as you zip to various distances nearer or farther from those distant parts of the universe. There could be no actual travel to the past. Unless, of course, you follow the Star Trek method of time travel and slingshot around the sun at warp 10+.

Or, maybe the Flash's method...I wouldn't know how to make a Cosmic treadmill though. Maybe Joshex could help with that.

Ya those particles moving faster then light were somehow not really moving faster then light.  Not really my area of expertise.

But it goes to show that once again Joshex could not be more incorrect even if he tried.  So many people would love it if we found a way to travel faster then light, and it certainly hasn't gone un-attempted. 

I believe there is a theory how to get a Warp Drive to work. We just don't have the technology to actually power it...yet.

[LadyVamp]

Huh, related to this guy?
https://images.weserv.nl/?url=vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net%2Fmaafanficuniverse%2Fimages%2Fa%2Fa7%2FMakeshift_villain.jpg

Could be a henchman.  I've always like the small, white dog with the gun and the cigar.  The dog has a mob boss look to him.

[Angel Phoenix77]

Yeah, not really: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/faster-than-light-neutrin/

About six months after OPERA's initial results were disclosed, the experimental team discovered two errors in their experiment: a loose cable that altered their test results slightly and a clock oscillator that was improperly calibrated.  Ironically the clock oscillator was running too fast which made the flight time of the neutrinos appear to be larger and thus the neutrinos appeared to be moving slower than they actually were, but that nearly cancelled out the delay caused by the loose cable.  The net result was that the neutrino flight times were measured as just a tiny bit lower than they actually were, which made the neutrinos appear to be moving slightly faster.  Either error alone would have been so large the experimenters would have known something was wrong, but the two errors combined to create a plausible result: neutrinos moving a hair faster than light.  When those errors were corrected, the superluminal velocity of neutrinos disappeared, and neutrinos were now observed to be moving at essentially the speed of light within their margin of error.

It should be noted that not only did the OPERA team find their technical error, but a nearby experiment called LVD combined their data with OPERA's data observing cosmic ray muons and discovered that the OPERA timing was different from the LVD timing by an amount consistent with the experimental error the OPERA team discovered.  So it wasn't just a case of the OPERA team changing their machine to get the results others wanted: it wasn't just making neutrino errors it was also making other timing errors that could be confirmed by comparing those results to other data being collected by completely independent experiments.


Edit: curses, too slow.

Thank you I stand corrected :), I just remember reading about it when it came out, but I did follow up on it.

[Arcana]

Could you explain "permeability of the vacuum?"

Basically, if you have two electric charges suspended in a substance of some kind electric field will form between them, and the strength of that field depends on a property of that substance called the electric permitivity - its kind of related to capacitance.  There's a similar property involving magnetic fields called the magnetic permeability.  I usually refer to the two values collectively as the electromagnetic permeability of the substance.  However, you can also generate electric and magnetic fields in a vacuum, and you get a relationship between charges and fields that allow you to measure those two constants for the case where there is no intervening substance - those are referred to as the electric permitivity and magnetic permeability of the vacuum itself. 

There's a deep relationship between the constants of electric fields and the constants of magnetic fields, and one of them is that relationship I mentioned above: the speed of light is equal to the square root of one over the product of the electric permitivity of the vacuum and the magnetic permeability of the vacuum.  Think about that.  Take two charges and measure the electric field between them when suspended in a vacuum.  Perform a similar experiment with fluctuating magnetic fields.  You get two numbers that seem to have nothing to do with each other, but if you multiply them together, take the reciprocal, and then take the square root of that number, you get the speed of light.  Not approximately the speed of light, but exactly the speed of light.  That's pretty neat actually.

Most people learn somewhere in a science class that back in the 1700s and 1800s scientists discovered that there was a relationship between electricity and magnetism, and you might even remember learning that electricity and magnetism are actually just parts of a larger electromagnetic force.  What you might not have learned unless you delved deeper into special relativity is that it is special relativity that explains what that relationship is.  Its a little complicated, but basically in one reference frame you might see moving charges creating magnetic forces, but in another reference frame those charges would appear to be stationary and the effects solely due to electrostatic forces.  But both observers ultimately see the same self-consistent electromagnetic situation in total.  Basically, magnetic forces can be explained as electric forces in a different reference frame.  Whether we see electric forces or magnetic forces is just a matter of perspective.

That may be true, but I wouldn't trust you to perform a medical procedure on me.

When I was a kid I was the best at Operation.  That has to count for something.

[Aggelakis]

I always thought "gone to the Americans" meant the game would be "gone, to the Americans," not "gone *to* the Americans." The result of jerk hackers making the game so messed up or unprofitable that the publisher would take it off the shelves, and to the american point of view, it would be gone.

Correct. Unique Dragon was distressed that the game would be shut down due to all the hacking by jerks. Little did we know that he wasn't just a dragon but a prophet; he was just a couple years too early and the jerks were NCsoft.

[Arcana]

I'm of the opinion that, if there were faster than light communication (or travel for that matter), that you wouldn't be able to get a response before you send a message, no matter how much faster than light the communication is. There would still be some forward progress of time during the transmission. Traveling at 100x the speed of light would not actually allow you to travel backwards in time. it would still take some time to get from point A to point B. You would just get there 100 times faster. All traveling faster than light would allow you to do (time travel wise) is look at different times in the past of distant parts of the universe as you zip to various distances nearer or farther from those distant parts of the universe. There could be no actual travel to the past. Unless, of course, you follow the Star Trek method of time travel and slingshot around the sun at warp 10+.

This is very difficult to communicate intuitively, because it requires a set of non-intuitive but experimental proven ideas.  The reason behind your confusion is that fundamentally you probably believe the universe obeys Galilean transformation.  This is one of the fundamental aspects of special relativity that takes a while to get used to, and if you didn't know about the massive amount of experimental verification of this principle you'd assume it was just some made-up mathematical hocus-pocus.  Velocities don't add, they combine via a special mathematical formula called the Lorentz transformation.  It is the Lorentz transformation that says that if you are moving at 0.99c and you shoot a bullet at 0.99c the bullet doesn't end up moving at 1.98c, it actually ends up moving at something closer to 0.995c.  This has been experimentally confirmed, so its not a guess or a mathematical approximation.  The Lorentz transformation is how the universe actually works.  Because of that, when you think about something moving at 100c you think that's just something moving faster, but it isn't.  For velocities higher than c the Lorentz transformation says that there exist observers for which the observed velocity is negative.  In other words, what we observe is not the object moving from A to B at 100 times the speed of light starting from now and ending in the future, but rather from B to A starting from now and ending in the past.  And because special relativity states that all inertial observers are equally valid, that means if an inertial observer sees causality violated then all observers must consider it violated as well.

The problem is that people believe the speed of light is like the speed of sound: its only hard to break it, that some force prevents it, and overcoming that force will allow you to do it.  But that's not how the speed of light works.  Space and time itself works in such a way that you cannot simply keep adding speeds together to get linearly faster.  It is like how some people think that the problem with black holes is that the gravity is just so strong that nothing can break that force, but it is always possible to think about some new technology that is "good enough."  That's not the problem.  The problem is that spacetime is so distorted beyond the event horizon that even if you could survive the horizon firewall that some theorize might be there and even if you could survive the gravitational stresses and even if you had infinite energy to power your rocket engines the one thing you won't be able to change is the fact that within the event horizon all geometric directions are actually curved to be inward.  It is like the train station in the Matrix Revolutions.  No matter how strong you are, how powerful you are, how fast you run, unless the train man allows you to leave all directions lead back to the train station.  Left, right, up, down, all take you back to the same place.  In black holes, no matter what direction you point your spaceship that direction will be "inward" and your rocket engines can do nothing except speed you into the black hole.

In the same way, relativity doesn't allow you to just go faster without side effects.  The Lorentz transforms force you to deal with the fact that the apparent constancy of the forward direction of time only applies when dealing with velocities lower than the Lorentz constant, which is c the speed of light.

[Thunder Glove]

Could be a henchman.  I've always like the small, white dog with the gun and the cigar.  The dog has a mob boss look to him.

Well, that guy (with the unlikely name of "Makeshift Villain") is a Chicago mob boss.  All his minions are smaller dogs with smaller guns - so the little white dog could be one of them.

(Incidentally, the discussion of Relativity is fascinating, but I just have nothing to contribute to that.  So instead I'll just reference obscure video games)

[Codewalker]

Velocities don't add, they combine via a special mathematical formula called the Lorentz transformation.  It is the Lorentz transformation that says that if you are moving at 0.99c and you shoot a bullet at 0.99c the bullet doesn't end up moving at 1.98c, it actually ends up moving at something closer to 0.995c.

While not intuitive at first, this starts to make more sense once remember that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames. In other words, if you are flying at 95% of the speed of light relative to some other object (say, a planet), you don't see photons moving faster on one side of you and slower to another. From your perspective, they are moving at the speed of light relative to you, just the wavelengths of the photons coming from the planet are extremely compressed or elongated.

If there were some other ships flying at similar velocities to you relative to the planet (or rather, very low velocity relative to you), everything would seem perfectly normal between those ships. And the whole point of relativity is that it is "normal", because there is no universal absolute reference frame. It's just that most of the observable universe happens to be moving in similar enough frames that we don't encounter relativistic phenomena every day.

But back to the point of the speed of light being observed as a constant in all reference frames... that sounds like a paradox until you realize that the only way that is possible is if time passes at different rates in different reference frames. I wish I had a link handy, but there's a great Youtube video that demonstrates how this works, how stretching out time preserves the "speed of light is a constant" property in all cases, and how that results in the other effects like apparent elongation and change in mass as observed by someone in a different frame.

[Remaugen]

A light beam heading east, collides with a light beam heading west, they meet at twice the speed of light.

[Tubbius]

A light beam heading east, collides with a light beam heading west, they meet at twice the speed of light.

That's heavy. . . .

[LadyVamp]

Well, that guy (with the unlikely name of "Makeshift Villain") is a Chicago mob boss.  All his minions are smaller dogs with smaller guns - so the little white dog could be one of them.

(Incidentally, the discussion of Relativity is fascinating, but I just have nothing to contribute to that.  So instead I'll just reference obscure video games)

I could just see that dog in my pic saying, "I want you to find this kitty boy, and I want him dead!  I want his litter mates dead!  I want his litter box burnt to the ground!  I want to go out into the night and pee on his ashes!" 

And I tuned out on the discussion of relativity when the posts got more than one paragraph.  I'll leave the discussions to those who find it more interesting.  My interests and talents lie elsewhere.

[Power Arc X]

All I remember  about speed of  light  is that the  universe  expands faster  than  the  speed  of light  and that nothing  can travel  faster  inside of our  universe.
If I  remember  correctly  Neil  deGrasse  Tyson explained  how even black holes  shrink as the slowly  lose 1 atom at a time taking  an unknown  amount of time for it to actually  not exist  itself.

[Paragon Avenger]

Just thought that you might want to know:

The talks are still on-going.  Just the other day I talked to someone.  There is a gag order, so if we squeal; they will gag us.  We are absolutely sure that we will have the game by this time, next year or earlier, or maybe later.  We love you, even that one guy with the thing and the limp and the ... forget about it.  So keep chatting in Paragon Chat, make lots of screen-shots and costumes.  Until next time, mums the word.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

A light beam heading east, collides with a light beam heading west, they meet at twice the speed of light.

https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2581/3779834896_a9c1d7f4d7_o.png

[Arcana]

But back to the point of the speed of light being observed as a constant in all reference frames... that sounds like a paradox until you realize that the only way that is possible is if time passes at different rates in different reference frames. I wish I had a link handy, but there's a great Youtube video that demonstrates how this works, how stretching out time preserves the "speed of light is a constant" property in all cases, and how that results in the other effects like apparent elongation and change in mass as observed by someone in a different frame.

So far, the best videos I've discovered that attempt to provide an intuitive grasp of the concept of spacetime geometry and how relativistic gravity works are in the relativity videos for the PBS Spacetime youtube channel.  However, I have yet to find what I consider to be a good, quick summary video of the mechanics of Lorentz transformation using light clocks, which I think are the best way to understand special relativity effects.

[Arcana]

A light beam heading east, collides with a light beam heading west, they meet at twice the speed of light.

An observer standing in between those two light beams would measure the eastward beam moving towards him at the speed of light and the westward beam moving towards him at the speed of light.  However, to state that the beams collide at twice the speed of light implies that there exists a frame of reference where one of the beams is standing still and the other moves towards that beam at twice the speed of light.  There is no reference frame where that statement is true.  In all reference frames both beams move at the speed of light.  Imagine an observer moving at very near the speed of light eastward just behind the eastward beam.  Relative to that observer, the eastward beam would be observed to move at the speed of light, and the westward beam would be observed to be moving at the speed of light.  It sounds counter-intuitive, because it is, but when you set intuition aside and work the physics out directly, that's the answer you get.

[Shibboleth]

While not intuitive at first, this starts to make more sense once remember that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames. In other words, if you are flying at 95% of the speed of light relative to some other object (say, a planet), you don't see photons moving faster on one side of you and slower to another. From your perspective, they are moving at the speed of light relative to you, just the wavelengths of the photons coming from the planet are extremely compressed or elongated.

If there were some other ships flying at similar velocities to you relative to the planet (or rather, very low velocity relative to you), everything would seem perfectly normal between those ships. And the whole point of relativity is that it is "normal", because there is no universal absolute reference frame. It's just that most of the observable universe happens to be moving in similar enough frames that we don't encounter relativistic phenomena every day.

But back to the point of the speed of light being observed as a constant in all reference frames... that sounds like a paradox until you realize that the only way that is possible is if time passes at different rates in different reference frames. I wish I had a link handy, but there's a great Youtube video that demonstrates how this works, how stretching out time preserves the "speed of light is a constant" property in all cases, and how that results in the other effects like apparent elongation and change in mass as observed by someone in a different frame.

It is pretty easy to derive from the base premise. Consider how the path a beam of light take between appears between the two frames. The most obvious thing that is different is the distance travelled. Relate those two. From there the basic equations fall out. We were presented with this (I won't admit how many years ago) in first semester, freshman physics.